I attended the Irish premiere of Public Enemies yesterday evening. The new film, directed by Michael Mann, is based on the life of 1930’s American gangster John Dillinger, played by Johnny Depp. The film hadn’t even made the final cut (as the end credits had yet to be added) but I was one of the lucky few who got to see it in advance of its worldwide release (thanks to movies.ie for the tickets).

Set during the Great Depression, the film is an adaptation of Bryan Burrough’s non-fiction book Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI. The story focuses on the true story of criminal John Dillinger and FBI agent Melvin Purvis’s efforts to stop him (Purvin is played effectively by Christian Bale). Concentrating on the gangster’s last years (1933 – 1934), Dillinger is portrayed as a Robin Hood type character, whom was somewhat idolized at the time by a public that was bored, broke and struggling during a depression. His manipulation of the press and his tendency to rob banks while letting the customers keep their own money added to his appeal at the time.

Depp plays the character with effortless charisma, delivering true to form slickly-scripted lines such as “I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars and you. What else do you need to know?” in response to a young lady’s request of wanting to know more about him. The lady in question becomes his girlfriend, Billie and is played by Academy Award winner Marion Cotillard with a great combination of hope and fear. There are some big moments in the film such as Dillinger’s escape from “escape proof” Crown Point jail where he drives off in the female sheriff’s car. Beyond the gun-packed chases, dangerous jailbreaks and daring bank robberies, however, much of the film unfolds in a surreal limbo somewhere between docu-style reality and beautiful urban legend storytelling. This surreal mood is embodied in scenes such as the one where Dillinger walks into an almost empty police station and chats to a few police men there about the score of a baseball game or when he sits under a giant image of his face on a cinema screen while a public service announcement asks the audience to stay vigilant as “he could be the man sat next to you.” Unfortunately, the plot is the films downfall as the story never fully develops and characters aren’t really explored. Many of the era’s personalities are paraded before the cameras (J. Edgar Hoover, Baby Face Nelson and so on) but they don’t have a meaningful place in the storyline other than the fact that they were involved in Dillinger’s life, and ultimately his death. An investigation into character is seriously lacking. For this reason Public Enemies is not quite a great movie. It’s a really good movie but there’s something missing – a more complex narrative or a deeper sense of who John Dillinger really was. It’s lacking a human element and perhaps some Depp-th, pardon the play on words.

What does make Public Enemies a really good movie however, is the technique. The film is technically impressive. Mann’s somewhat controversial decision to shoot with the Thomson VIPER camera, one of the most high-end HD cameras available today, marked one of the first occasions that a big budget, Hollywood period piece had been shot using the format. The debate over film versus digital has increased over recent years with directors like Steven Soderbergh and David Lynch declaring their love for digital cinematography and subsequently committing to this by shooting their films Bubble and Inland Empire using HD equipment. Digital cinematography has also become pervasive in independent film-making as it is extremely cost effective to shoot with. Mann, however, isn’t trying to save money. Instead, he uses High Definition to open up a new dimension in artistic film-making and in a way that complements the story. The depth of field in his films extends further than films shot on 35mm and things simply look different. The VIPER camera can pick up extensive detail and thus adds a more realistic visual tone to a scene, giving it a documentary-like realism. As a result, Public Enemies feels more believable. And this is what makes the movie important on a visual level. It hints at how the HD format can be used to unveil different dimensions in a scene or present an audience with a different, more authentic version of an era that they have never seen before. Mann stated that he wanted audiences to fully interact with the movie: “I shot in HD for a reason. My objective wasn’t to have people look at a period film, I wanted the audience to be involved in the film. I wanted it to feel like it had all the complexity of what it was like in that period of time.” (Source: Michael Mann’s HD defence.)

The sound design was excellent – guns in a Michael Mann movie really do sound like guns. The composer Elliot Goldenthal scored the film, the soundtrack features Billie Holiday and jazz musician Diana Krall makes a cameo appearance. Interestingly, Mann commissioned graphic designer Neville Brody to create a new font for the film. Brody, which Brody named New Deal. Brody and his team at Research Studios took inspiration from Soviet Constructivist styles, the New Deal program and the publicity material of the WPA as a basis for the font. The final design was apparently selected from more than 300 options. (Source: Wikipedia.)

On one final but interesting note, there is a romantic perspective that it may not have been John Dillinger who was shot that evening at the Biograph cinema. This was not explored in the film but the fact that people are still talking about the gangster is a testimony to both his notoriety and his continuing popularity as a folk hero. It’s this human element that is missing from the film and that could have been more explored in order to turn a really good film into a great film.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Art & Technology, Film, Photography & Cinematography. You can keep updated on the conversation by subscribing to the comments feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.